Last week we attended the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Lyon, France. This year's IFLA Congress was the best attended in the last several years, with 3,900 delegates from all over the world, including France, Korea, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, Uzbekistan, Uganda, Nigeria, Russia, Trinidad & Tobago, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

We attend this conference in order to meet librarians from around the world, learn about issues that affect or are important to the global library community, and to promote our Press internationally. Next year's Congress will be held in Cape Town, South Africa and the 2016 Congress will be held in Columbus, Ohio.

IFLA/Brill Open Access AwardCongratulations to Knowledge Unlatched for winning the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award! Knowledge Unlatched "depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust... The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines." Knowledge Unlatched was chosen as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field. Read the full press release here.

August 24, 2014

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

August 15, 2014

Today we have a guest post by Michael E. Donoghue, Associate Professor of History at Marquette University and author of Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. He discusses the history of the building of the Panama Canal, and its continued impact on US foreign relations and the world.

The opening of the Panama Canal on August 15, 1914 marked a monumental event in U.S., Panamanian, Latin American, and global history. The opening confirmed the ascension of the United States to the first rank of world powers, a process that had begun years earlier with Washington’s victory in the 1898 Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War. While other European and Latin American nations had dreamt of its excavation and France had failed in its recent attempt, only the United States had succeeded, affirming its technological and moral superiority in the minds of many of its citizens. (Though, Americans were irked that the outbreak of World War I relegated the story to page two). In global terms, the completion of this strategic waterway made the world a much smaller place, saving cargo and passenger carriers thousands of miles of travel and millions in costs with its shorter route between the Atlantic and Pacific, ending the necessity of rounding the horn of South America to traverse from one ocean to the other. As such, the Canal’s opening facilitated the process of interconnecting the entire world in networks of trade and culture, what we now call globalization. And the workers from all over the world who helped build the channel in a brutal ten-year struggle (1904-1914) of man versus tropical nature, accentuated the Canal’s globalized character. The conquest of yellow fever, mudslides, cave-ins, and dynamite explosions during construction took a terrible human toll especially on the non-U.S. workforce.

While the Canal’s opening aided Latin American trade, it had more unfortunate consequences forAmerica’s southern neighbors by enhancing U.S. dominance of the hemisphere, particularly in the circum Caribbean region and on the isthmus of Central America where the Canal and its surrounding Zone bases established the United States as a hegemonic power. Numerous U.S. interventions in the region would now be justified “to protect the Panama Canal.” These interventions often occurred in the republic of Panama itself, where U.S. troops marched in to “establish order” and “protect U.S. interests” nine times between 1904 and 1925. Indeed no nation was more intimately affected by the waterway than Panama, a small new country that seceded from Colombia in 1903 with U.S. prodding and military aid to avoid Colombian intransigence on negotiations and ensure a favorable treaty that granted nearly sovereign U.S. rights to build, maintain, and guard the Canal. The fifty-mile-long, ten-mile-wide zone around the Canal created by the 1903 treaty quickly coalesced into a state-within-a-state with a U.S. government, military bases, police force, law code, prison, and numerous clubhouses and commissaries for U.S. and foreign workers. Within this Zone, foreign laborers, the overwhelming number of them imported West Indians, endured lower wages and segregated facilities on the “silver roll” versus American foremen and workers on the higher-paid “gold roll.” West Indians carried out most of the dangerous and arduous work on the Canal with over 4,000 official deaths and perhaps three times more undocumented ones. Their ancestors still lament their lack of recognition for these sacrifices and the racial discrimination they endured.

After construction, the overwhelming U.S. presence in Panama eventually sparked local resistance and complaints about unequal treatment and an unfair sharing of the financial benefits of the Canal. Racial discrimination in the Zone and the relatively privileged lifestyles of the U.S. workers and their families in comparison to impoverished Panamanians provoked frustration. Access to the Zone was barred for most Panamanians and when crossing from one side of their country to the other, they faced questioning from a foreign police force speaking a foreign language threatening at times to send them to a foreign prison, Gamboa Penitentiary in the Zone. In 1964 pent-up Panamanian anger exploded in an uprising that took the lives of twenty-one Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers. In 1977 the Jimmy Carter administration negotiated new treaties that called for the end of the Canal Zone and the gradual transfer of the waterway to Panama which culminated on December 31, 1999 with complete local control. In recent years Panama has begun construction on a new set of wider locks to enlarge the Canal’s capacity and make it viable for the larger supertankers and cargo carriers. These new locks are planned to open in 2015. Today Panamanians celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Canal’s opening and much of the bitterness over their colonial relationship with the United States has faded. Both the old and the new Canals have and will greatly amplify global trade and the interconnected nature of our world. The August 15, 1914 opening of this monumental triumph in engineering and human sacrifice (once hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”) forever altered the destiny of the United States, Panama, and the world.

August 13, 2014

Congratulations to Duke Mathematical Journal editor Phillip Griffiths! He was awarded the 2014 Chern Medal for his work in complex geometry, particularly his work in Hodge theory and periods of algebraic varieties. The prize is given at the International Congress of Mathematicians, which is being held currently in Seoul, South Korea.

Several contributors to DMJ have also been awarded the Fields Medal, including Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the medal. Other winners include Artur Avila and Manjul Bhargava. See a list of their contributions to DMJ below. Congratulations to all!

August 09, 2014

Congratulations to Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue for winning the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The Don D. Walker Prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year.Sae-Saue's article, "Aztlán’s Asians: Forging and Forgetting Cross-Racial Relations in the Chicana/o Literary Imagination," appeared in the September 2013 issue of American Literature (85:3). Curtis Marez's piece from American Literature (85:4) was given an honorable mention for the same award.

August 07, 2014

Congratulations to Curtis Marez, who received an honorable mention for the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year. The award committee found Marez's American Literature piece, "Cesar Chavez's Video Collection," "an exciting, innovative work of interdisciplinary scholarship that reflects the aspirations of the Walker Award in demonstrating the untapped possibilities of our still unfolding field."

The digital piece was a collaboration between the journal and Scalar, a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Read more about the piece in a previous guest blog post by American Literature managing editor Emily Dings entitled "Chavez Behind the Camera," here. “Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is an offshoot of Marez’s book Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History of New Media (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and is available on the Scalar platform here.

Check out the rest of the American Literature special issue, "New Media and American Literature," which includes three additional open-access digital projects, here.